I don’t understand why people think it looked like that 4000y ago…
The closest settlement, Giza, looked like this in 1800 CE (!): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Description_de_l'Egypte_-_Etat_Moderne_-_Pl_16.jpg
You can look on a map how far it is to the pyramids from there…
Edit: ugh, link is broken. 🙄 Scroll down to history here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giza
I went to university in the 2000s at a smallish German Technical University. Rarely anyone used jabber. What literally everybody in the early 2000s was using was ICQ. Every dorm had ethernet, everybody had a PC and everybody had ICQ running 24/7. The ones not living on campus were peer pressured into getting DSL (which was still uncommon elsewhere).
Then came Facebook, and suddenly all those ICQ contacts were gone. Still, rarely anyone used jabber, only those who didn’t like Facebook. I didn’t know a single person who was on Google Talk.
Then came Android, iOS and Whatsapp, and that’s what „killed“ XMPP, because XMPP was so not ready for mobile networks.